Performance Lawn Equipment (PLE) originally produced lawn mowers, but a significant portion of sales volume over recent years, has come from the growing small-tractor market. PLE sells their products world-wide, with sales regions including North America, South America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. Three years ago a new region was opened to serve China, where a booming market for small tractors has been established. PLE has always emphasized quality and considers the quality it builds into its products as its primary selling point. In the past 2 years, PLE has also emphasized the ease of use of their products.
Before digging into the details of operations, Elizabeth Burke wants to gain an overview of PLE's overall business performance and market position by examining the information provided in the database. Specifically, she is asking you to construct appropriate charts for the data in the following worksheets and summarize your conclusions from analysis of these charts:
a. Dealer Satisfaction
b. End-User Satisfaction
c. Complaints
d. Mower Unit Sales
e. Tractor Unit Sales
f. On-time Delivery
g. Defects After Delivery
h. Response Time
Part 2. The supply chain worksheets provide cost data associated with logistics between existing plants and customers as well as proposed new plants. Ms. Burke wants you to extract the records associated with the unit shipping costs of proposed plant locations and compare the costs of existing locations against those of the proposed locations using quartiles.
Part 3. Ms. Burke would also like a quantitative summary of the average responses for each of the customer attributes in the worksheet 2012 Customer Survey for each market region as a cross-tabulation (see Sample Table A) and as a histogram.
Write a formal report summarizing your results for all three parts of this case.
Sample Table A.
Region Quality Ease of Use Price Service
NA
Q1
Q2
Q3
Mean
SA
Q1
Q2
Q3
Mean
Eur
Q1
Q2
Q3
Mean
Pac
Q1
Q2
Q3
Mean
China
Q1
Q2
Q3
Mean #question..